Kiss Me Hard Before You Go
by words end here
Summary: Dan surprises himself when he writes the sequel to 'Inside.' Post season five, Dan/Blair oneshot.


**A/N: **So this is my obligatory Dair-pression fic. That's all there really is to it because I can never let go of this ship despite the utter mess that is Gossip Girl. And I never want Blair or Dan to let go either. There's very minor mentions of DS/CB and DG here. Spoilers for all aired episodes of GG. The title is taken from Lana Del Rey's 'Summertime Sadness.'

* * *

_I think I'll miss you forever_

_Like the stars miss the sun in the morning skies._

* * *

Blair leaves with nothing but an e-mail signed off with _I'm sorry._

It's the ideal way to drag out Dan's one nagging insecurity - the only one he ever really had in his relationship with Blair; that he was just an interlude, some fun before she was ready to return to the real thing and summon the strength needed to tame Chuck Bass.

She leaves a silence. The part of Dan's day that was spent having conversations and coffee now begs to be filled again. A part of Dan's evening that asks, _what are you going to do now? _Sometimes_,_ he feels a type of silence so still that he doesn't know what to do, other than write through it.

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He has sex with Georgina – once, twice, thrice – for purely selfish reasons. It doesn't signify anything other than one long, self-pity-fest.

(And it's not about Blair, either, Dan is convinced. The shade of Georgina's hair is too dark, her chest too big, her tone too malicious, revealing no layer of vulnerability underneath the caustic comments.)

.

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Dan surprises himself when he writes the sequel to '_Inside' -_ within a week.

"Like some sort of fucked up Hemingway wannabe on crack," As Georgina had so elegantly phrased it.

Dan finds a certain satisfaction in playing God with the characters he once thought he would never be able to touch again. It's an opportunity to rewrite history, or predict the future. There isn't much of a distinction anymore, he thinks. Ultimately, the characters end up in similar situations to where they started. They make their mistakes, some of them learn, the others just repeat history. The characters run their own course: Dylan ends up with Sabrina and Charlie Trout finally captures Claire.

Dan doesn't do anything deliberate with them. Except this;

He writes a rocky road for Dylan and Sabrina. But their ending is saccharine sweet.

He ensures that Charlie and Claire's marriage is marred with misery throughout the majority of the story.

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New York pulls all of them back into the city again, eventually.

Dan delays his return for as long as possible, to the point when his agent is leaving daily calls demanding his return to promote the highly anticipated sequel – _'Exiled.'_

Dan walks into the loft, greeted by a gruff hug from his father. He spots the New York Times laid open on the table.

And there they are, on page six, her hand on his chest and his arm gripped around her, the engagement announcement and photographs consuming three-quarters of the damn page.

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He spots Serena, drinking alone at the Palace hotel bar.

She still conveys every aspect of mystery and allure that had captivated him so many years ago. The only difference now is that he is all too aware of the cracks behind the appearance. He's forging a career writing about them, opening them up and exploring them on the page.

As he approaches her, he remembers how harshly he had spoken to her the last time they saw each other. How he felt manipulated. How he was using her in a way she had never exploited him, in a way that was so contradictory to how their high school relationship had started. He isn't aware of just how remorseful he feels until he sees her face again. Her smile upon seeing him is warm and inviting. "Dan." She says his name like they never left the city this summer, like she saw him yesterday.

"How would you feel," he begins, "about going on a date with some guy you don't know?"

He asks because this is the way things are meant to be.

This is the way the story plays out.

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Blair's on page forty the evening when Serena calls.

"I thought you needed to hear it from me, rather than-

"Viewing it on Gossip Girl?" Blair is acutely aware of how her voice hitches when she adds, "Too late."

There's a silence before "I'm sorry, B." But Blair knows when Serena is being sincere, and this is one of those instances.

"Honestly, S, I understand." Blair catches her reflection in their bedroom mirror and feels strangely grateful that Serena decided to do this over the phone. "I'm so happy, really. And I'm glad you are too. Let's not ruin it this time."

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Blair's racing through the book, having just finished another chapter dedicated to Claire/Charlie conflict. Dan's style has always been eloquent, but she has decided she can barely stand the repetitive plot. (_And really, Humphrey, who writes a sequel to a critically acclaimed debut novel?) _Only a masochist hangs that kind of artistic albatross around their neck.

When Chuck returns home that evening, she slams the cover shut and shoves the thing into her handbag.

Chuck tosses his own copy onto the coffee table. "Humphrey's latest piece of trash." His voice is snide. "Sure to be amusing." He places her hands on her shoulders and kisses her cheek, like giving her the book is giving her the greatest gift in the world. "Report back with what your critical Waldorf gaze finds funny." He adds his tone every bit as assured as when she turned sixteen and he had placed his necklace around her.

Blair finishes the book in their bed that same night, Chuck asleep beside her. She suddenly feels suffocated by his mere presence.

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They're in his bedroom at the loft when Serena shoves him onto his bed after kissing heatedly.

"Ouch," Dan fumbles for whatever jabbed into his back.

"Sorry," Serena replies, "heat of the moment, you know?"

Dan does know. They've been here so many times before.

It's Blair's copy of Wuthering Heights that stabs him in the back, fittingly. It's the same copy he's been reading. He wonders if Serena ever considers the layer of Blair in his bedroom, if she ever feels her presence the way he still does.

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Serena throws a belated launch party for _'Exiled.' _

Blair and Chuck have their reservations about attending. But Serena says, "Oh come on B, you're all about business these days. Loosen up," she adds in her fifteen year old party voice. "Celebrate the fact that we're past all the drama."

Maybe Blair's being paranoid, which certainly isn't a first for a Waldorf woman, but the whole affair seems more like a victory party, with the distinct air of _I got the guy in the end. _

Blair realises that it's been six months, half a year since she saw him last. Same bad suit, but at least he got a haircut.

He's outside smoking a cigarette when joins him. "You could have at least sent me a signed copy." She says by way of greeting.

He doesn't turn around the look at her right away. He can't even feel the resentment he knows he should. He's just embarrassed by the relief that settles upon him, hearing that commanding tone again.

And apparently he's smiling too because Blair has a smile of her own.

And then he turns his sight to her face. Those lips. That pale skin. The brown eyes that had drawn him in so effortlessly. "You bought it." He manages to say.

"And half the thing consists of my apparent misery. Seriously Humphrey?" She flips the book open to page a hundred and eighteen, "_When Charlie kissed her, she felt the weight of their broken fairytale crash down on her all over again." _ Blair flings the book to his feet. He would have laughed at this once, if his heart didn't ache for her all over again.

If her opinion still didn't matter more than anyone else's.

"And Dylan and Sabrina get the _happily ever after _part." Blair huffs. "The term 'thinly veiled' doesn't even apply to this."

"One couple has to be happy so the reader realises the magnitude of the misery the others have to live with," Dan bites back, "it's called _contrast, _Waldorf."

"I wonder if Serena would be so happy if she realised the whole book is about me, once _again." _Blair accuses.

"Only the Waldorf sense of self-entitlement could make you assume that."

"Frankly, you write about Claire with greater depth than you ever did Sabrina." Blair states, as diplomatic as Blair Waldorf can be, "at least there's some shred of continuity within the mess."

"If you're so sickeningly happy," Dan says, his tone low, "then why does my mess matter so much to you?"

Blair has no reply for that.

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Blair had no real right to verbally assault him like that, Dan realises.

There was no warning that she wanted to end what they had, after all. They had been happy together, he wasn't in that alone, and she left the happiness they had created. It was her own choice, he reasons. It was strange for Blair, a woman who is usually so brutally honest with the people in her life, to live according to this illusion in her mind.

She abandoned him without a warning.

It stings more, when he realises that he had never abandoned her once throughout their friendship. Not even to serve his own romantic motives.

(Worst of all, Dan still hasn't abandoned her. Not on the pages.)

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Blair spends the evening alone in her childhood bedroom re-reading _'Inside.' _

And then she reads some reviews of the sequel. Critics are generous towards it, but there's a common thread that runs through most of the reviews. Most of them abhor the destruction of the Dylan/Claire relationship.

And then Blair starts sobbing, manically. She left no sign to Dan that anything had ended. And nothing instructs Blair to forget.

Dorota appears in the doorway and Blair throws her arms around her. "We will talk it out, Miss Blair."

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What nobody knows is, Dan wrote an alternative ending to the sequel. He only wrote the published ending afterwards.

In his first ending, Dan made Claire run. She doesn't marry the dark prince of Manhattan. She stays single. Maybe it's a melodramatic ending, Dan knows, but he also knows no one does melodrama the way Blair Waldorf does.

He doesn't quite know what he is setting himself up for when he emails the alternative ending to Blair with a note attached;

_Blair,_

_I'm sorry you didn't like the book. Maybe it doesn't even matter to you at all, but your opinion still matters to me. In the end I guess you left me, and I was bitter about it. But I'm with Serena now._

_.  
_

_.  
_

_.  
_

Two weeks after Dan sends her that email, to which there is no reply, he walks into the elevator of Serena's building and she's standing right there, wearing a green hair band.

"Humphrey," she acknowledges with her tone as haughty as ever.

"So what did you think?" He asks, and remembers how balanced, sometimes challenging their conversations were; the conversations during coffee, then the conversations in bed. How he waited on her every word. How, even after the way she left him, he could still bring himself to write _your opinion still matters to me._

She won Chuck back, but he still seems absent.

"I found it...refreshing." She says, careful as ever with how she hides. "Claire is a strong willed woman, after all." She catches him looking at the ring on her finger.

The conversation ends at that, and the history they share in this particular elevator hangs heavy between them.

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There's a soft knock at the door of his loft. He hopes it isn't Serena, coming over to provide _"a worthwhile distraction from your writing." _

Instead he receives Blair, walking into his loft slowly. Like with ever inch they move closer to each other, they will break like porcelain.

"Dan," she says, and he wishes she would never say his name like that. "You know...you know that I'm engaged. That you and I should have never –

And then his lips are on hers and it's hard and messy and desperate.

"Happened." He finishes her sentence because her breathing is shallow. "But it did." His eyes are imploring hers for some sort of answer. "We happened."

She stops his hand from caressing her face. She plants a small kiss to it and leaves.

Blair leaves Dan with nothing more than a goodbye kiss.

* * *

End


End file.
